Second- and sixth-grade children and adults (ns = 20) were presented with a word-association task used by Brown and Berko. Adults were given both high- and low-frequency stimuli of the same form classes to assess the effects of word frequency on word associations. The results suggest that whether the word-association response is of the same or different form class as the stimulus word is related to the word-count frequency of the stimulus and S's age. Adults, presented low-frequency stimuli, respond like second-grade children, presented high-frequency stimuli.
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